Be ready to be picked by Apple Stuff
14 03 2008I am sure you’ve heard the 5th Symphony of Beethoven: taa-taa-taa-taammm. The initial motif of the symphony has sometimes been credited with symbolic significance as a representation of Fate knocking at the door. Well, two weeks ago it knocked at my door.
Apple seems to like my games. Everytime I submit our game to Apple downloads it is rated high and gets good coverage. I have also found out that Apple stuff tries to find good software on their own. That’s how they picked Path of Magic (after PR). But somehow they found out about Pony World, added it to their catalogue and made it featured game for kids.
In the first day we received over 2000 downloads and it didn’t dried off quickly. But we received just one! order. Imagine my shock and disappointment. When your game gets 0.02% CR it is a dissaster.
The problem is – the game was not fully ready to be launched. We added it to our catalog to get players feedback, but without pushing it to hard to the crowds. It was also Mac Intel only.
Once Apple featured us we quickly released Universal Binaries and fixed 2 or 3 bugs. That made a trick. CR increased to 0.5%. It’s not a good one, but it’s soo much better than 0.02%. I knew that the game may not sell like fire… that’s why we’ve been working on Pony World Deluxe for last 3 months. Still, 0.02% is something hard to believe for a game like Pony World.
It shows that Power PC has still very big share on Macs. Don’t even try to fool yourself with Mac Intel only release. It will not get you far.
It also shows that you never know when or who can feature you – and once it happen – you better be ready!
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I’ve been picked by Apple a few days ago with my last game Spring Up! and I’ve been disappointed by my CR, too, but I think I made mistakes with this games (such as a gameplay that is not casual enough).
To react on your article, I’m not sure it’s the universal binary that increased your CR, because on Apple, games have an icon when they are Intel Only. It can however affect the number of downloads (and sales). Spring Up! was Universal Binary, whereas my previous game was PPC Only (and worked with Rosetta on Mac Intel).
When they put you on the top of the page there is no indication that it is Mac Intel or Universal. There’s just download button. That place has a lot of space for description and big screenshot, so I am sure a lot of people just click on the download link without checking version.
Of course, being featured means that there’s a lot of accidental traffic, but still should not drop CR by 20x.
Fairway (U. Binary) was the no.1 game on apple.com for quite a while (made me proud) and it also was no.8 of ALL downloads between Firefox and Goole Earth! haha :-)
Mac conversion rate has been massive, like really massive. So it’s definitely worth doing.